A FOSSCOMM talk on Openess in Astronomy

On the previous weekend (October 13-14, 2018) the 11th Free and Open Source Software Communities Meeting was held in Heraklion of Crete (Greece). This is the Greek conference of the communities that develop free and open source software (such as Mozilla, Fegora, etc.). Although the meeting focuses on programmers and students it is open to all parties with a strong interest in open processes including other areas beyond just the software, such as hardware, society, economy, etc. Starting in 2008, it has been organized in 6 different cities so far (but not in Heraklion!), gathering a few hundred participants each time.

With such a diverse and different audience we (myself, Antonis Manousakis, and Eva Ntormousi) thought that it would be a great opportunity to present our (relatively biased) collected experience of these processed and applications from the modern research in Astronomy. So the title and the corresponding abstract was:

“Examples of openess in Astronomy”

Grigoris Maravelias, Antonis Manousakis, Eva Ntormousi

Traditionally Astronomy is a collaborative science in the sense that many researchers collaborate to observe a phenomenon, and they share their observations for further analysis and interpretation. Building upon this tradition many observatories today make available their observations so that modern astronomers have access to large datasets. Additionally, the technological advance of the instruments allows the observation of the Universe almost at the entire electromagnetic spectrum, even at the very recently confirmed gravitational waves. Thus, the modern astronomers are not only required to understand the Astrophysics behind these huge datasets but often they are called to develop the own necessary tools to conduct their research. Given the knowledge and the vast volume of data available today the collaborations are, more than ever, vital (especially with the forthcoming large projects that are currently built, e.g. 30m telescopes). In the framework of modern Astronomy we are going to present successful examples of how open approach has been applied.

While presenting openess in Astronomy, during the Free and Open Source Software Community Meeting of 2018 in Heraklion, Greece. [Copyright 2018 Pierros Papadeas, CC BY-SA-NC]

This particular talk is released under the CC-BY-SA license, so we are going to provide all necessary material along with the presentation. Although in Greek, most probably an english version will become also available in the future.

UPDATE 2019/06/24:– After some time I managed to put all the material of this talk under a github repository: https://github.com/gmaravel/OpeningAstronomy This will the place where I will put everything related with this subject in an effort to promote more Openness in Astronomy. Although this talk is actually in Greek, I will updated with an English version also.